A century ago, Northampton’s Calvin Coolidge, an Amherst College graduate, was president of the United States. Many of his advisors and associates were Amherst alumni and this column is about one of them.
When Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency after the death of Warren Harding, the initial problem facing him was the political fallout from the series of scandals that would forever tarnish the Harding legacy. He needed an attorney general the public could trust to prosecute the crimes and he turned to an old college acquaintance, Harlan Fiske Stone.
Stone had been born in New Hampshire in 1872 but his family had moved to western Massachusetts in the Amherst area when he was only two. He graduated from Amherst High School and matriculated at Massachusetts Agricultural College because his father desired him to become a progressive farmer. That career proved of little interest to Stone and he entered Amherst College in 1890, graduating four years later. Stone taught science at Newburyport High School for a year and then was accepted at Columbia Law School in 1895.
After graduation, Stone chose to practice law in New York City and joined a firm of which he eventually became a partner. He lectured at Columbia Law School and became a professor there from 1902-05. Stone left his old firm and became a partner in a more prestigious one before becoming Dean of Columbia Law School from 1910-23. During World War I he served on the War Department’s Board of Inquiry to evaluate the cases of thousands of men whose status as conscientious objectors had been denied by their local draft boards. Stone had little sympathy for the applicants but did express admiration for their courage to maintain their beliefs in spite of their unpopularity with the general public.
After the war, Stone advocated for free speech rights for socialists and professors. He criticized the actions of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for his raids on immigrants and the attempt to deport them without judicial process. Columbia Law School began to teach a more liberal and less formal view of the law which led Stone into conflict with the university’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. In 1923 Stone resigned as dean of the law school and became a partner in a large firm with the potential to earn him a high salary.
On April 1, 1924, Stone’s old college friend, President Calvin Coolidge, appointed him attorney general. Under the leadership of the previous appointee, Harry Daugherty, the Department of Justice had lost all credibility with the public. Stone immediately fired all Daugherty’s cronies and appointed J. Edgar Hoover as head of what eventually became the FBI. Stone personally argued many cases in court and began an anti-trust action against the Aluminum Company of America even though it was controlled by the family of Andrew Mellon who was Secretary of the Treasury in Coolidge’s cabinet.
Stone campaigned for Coolidge during the election of 1924 and, shortly after Coolidge’s victory, there was an opening on the Supreme Court when Justice McKenna retired. Coolidge nominated Stone for the seat and, after becoming the first nominee to ever testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was confirmed in February 1925. Stone joined justices Holmes and Brandeis and later Cardozo, who replaced Holmes, as a liberal faction urging judicial restraint and deference to the will of the Legislature. Stone, Brandeis and Cardozo became known as the “three musketeers” during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt for their support of New Deal policies. Roosevelt appreciated Stone’s support and in 1941, after the resignation of Charles Evan Hughes, he appointed Stone Chief Justice. His court approved the president’s decision to try Nazi saboteurs who were captured on American soil in military tribunals and also the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
While reading a dissent on April 22, 1946, Stone suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died later that day. He was buried in the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington and he was survived by his wife, Agnes, and sons Lauson and Marshall. Stone had come a long way from his early years in Amherst. He had risen to the top of his profession with an assist from his college friend, Calvin Coolidge.
Richard Szlosek lives in Northampton.